Month: December 2014

In English class, we had been working on pathos and other persuasive techniques, and we are told to make a screencast that compares and contrasts between the poem and the ad. For Ad, I chose “Report to Wordsworth” written by Boey Kim Cheng, and for the ad I chose the ad which is based on endangered turtles, which is made by Greenpeace.

Recently, there are over 500,000 trashes orbiting the earth, which is quite a big problem in these days. Why they are made, because in around 60 years ago, USA and Soviet Union started competing against each other on space development. First space trash was made by mistake in 1964, American satellite called Vanguard 1, because controllers could not control it anymore, and it kept rotating the earth, so now scientists are more comfortable at leaving trashes in the space than before.

There are many sizes of trashes – trash that is as tiny as some insects, but there are also quite big ones like fuel tanks. According to NASA, those trashes orbit the earth at the speed of about 17,500 miles per hour (28,163.5km/h).

Even though trashes are very tiny, it’s very dangerous for rocket, because they might crash with each other and huge disaster might happen. Also there is danger that trashes might come back to earth. Some parts might burn while coming back to earth, but some big pieces might not burn and crash into the surface. This disaster happened in 1997, and it made a big crater onto the surface.

Many people say that building Space Shuttle that cleans up the space is the most encouraging idea. Now US-based Star Technology and Research is trying to build the machine that picks up the trash. Then those trashes can be thrown in the ocean. Also Swiss scientists are working on satellite called Clean Space. This machine picks up the trash and throws it straight into the atmosphere so that they can be burnt in the atmosphere (hopefully).

I think that this is quite dangerous for the environment, because there is the danger of trashes falling into earth. If this happens, some country might be badly damaged, and serious pollution problem might happen. However, I think that it’s good thing that some scientists are working hard to clean up the space and fix this serious problem. I hope that this problem will be fixed as soon as possible and space will be very clean!

Unfamiliar scientific words:

Orbit: The curved path, normally described by a planet, satellite, spaceship.